My parents have a tea plant but I moved away from their city before the spring so didn't get a chance to make any. I think the plant really needs to be quite mature to make tea? The one I had access to was 30 odd years old. If I'm visiting my family at an appropriate time of year I'll try my hand at tea making. I wouldn't expect much in terms of quality but think it could be a really fun activity.

I apologize for not being able to find any example threads at the moment, but this topic surfaces periodically on this forum. Usually the consensus about growing tea trees for tea seems to be that it isn't worth it because:

The tea trees require 5+ years of maturation before the leaves and buds can be harvested for tea

Creating processed, ready-to-drink, drinkable tea from the raw leaves takes a lot of experience and effort

It takes quite a bit of raw leaf to make a worthwhile quantity of dry tea leaf

That said, there are a few people who have managed to grow/harvest/process their own. Hopefully they will surface to share their advice/experience

Thanks guys, I know where there are illegally-planted tea bushes here in Hong Kong and the local villagers harvest and drink it (green). Might be worth attempting to grow my own organic green tea just for the heck of it. It also may be worthwhile drinking younger leaves to see how they differ in taste.

Nico (ChinesePottery) posted a number of pictures of making his own tea from wild growing tea trees in China while he and he wife lived there. You can find the thread right here. I got to try some of it, and it wasn't too bad!

I've considered planting tea trees / bushes at my house, but my intention is mostly symbolic and decorative, not to produce anything serious. Years down the line maybe I'll mess with it, but I'm mostly after some greenery.

Some fun facts about Hong Kong for you guys--around 40% of HK is govt. protected land. Even plucking a leaf on that land is a violation of the law, but people go ahead and plant stuff anyway since there is a very small team responsible for enforcement in the country parks. There are even dead spots that are outside the reach of our cell phone towers, which is pretty crazy since we have pretty much perfect coverage everywhere in urban HK. My cell phone even works in the elevator!

The biodiversity in HK's forests would absolutely blow you away, even the forests that were heavily bombed by the Japanese in WWII.

We're at the same latitude as Jamaica, so the jungle here is absolutely thriving with life. We had tigers here up until the 1940s, when the last one was shot dead. We still have native civets, barking deer, king cobras, Chinese cobras, kraits and probably over a thousand species that are as of yet unknown and unclassified.

This species, thought to be extinct, was rediscovered in the 2000s. The frogs are as small as your thumbnail when fully grown!

I believe Marshal's tried the wild stuff and said it wasn't much to write home about, but I have to give it a try myself. I may have to take a cutting too...

As for villages, you'd be amazed. There are quite a few villages in HK, some of which are entirely closed off to outsiders with fences and guard dogs. Even some of the larger villages have no vehicular access whatsoever--you have to walk in. Many are controlled by the local villagers who set up a gang of sorts, and if you're foreign and want to park your car you need to pay protection money or you'll find some (not-so) mysterious damage to your vehicle. Even the police don't go in and bother people in certain villages unless there's a murder or something (it's like being on a native American reservation).

Certain indigenous families of HK and their descendants have land rights--they are given plots of land with which they can build on (although due to laws they can only build a maximum of a three-story, 2100 sq ft home). Many of the descendants now build homes to rent to gweilo (foreign devils, aka white people) and the descendants then pocket the rent to fund their cushy lives, often overseas!

Between Christmas and New Year's I'm going to go on a tea hunt out in the mountains of Lantau with my mountain bike.

Last edited by jayinhk on Dec 17th, '13, 03:22, edited 3 times in total.

No problem! When I was a kid, some of these villages were so old school and remote you couldn't even take pictures of the residents or they'd freak out at your devil machine!

Sadly the government has seized much of the old village land and continues to do so today...when people just want to live their lives. Typical HK. Some of the most beautiful, wild trails have been concreted over and 'sanitized.' Crying shame...

It's a beautiful park, and I have worked out and practiced my pencak silat there on a few occasions.

Kowloon City is where most people go for Thai food and Thai cooking supplies now. lol. There's a good tea store there and lots of dining options. I used to work right by it, but seldom explored it when I worked there since I had so much going on.

Last edited by jayinhk on Dec 17th, '13, 03:35, edited 2 times in total.

Yixing was actually China's greatest tea-producing place before teapot. During Tang-Song, tribute teas came from Yixing, Jianzhou, Huzhou and mt. Wuyi. Longjing's Hangzhou only got its fame after Qing dynasty..

No doubt they have wonderful teas, Yang Xian Xue Ya is still very famous

jayinhk wrote:The Kowloon Walled City was completely destroyed--there's a nice park where it used to stand now. Again, HK govt sanitization...

Kowloon City is where most people go for Thai food and Thai cooking supplies now. lol. There's a good tea store there and lots of dining options. I used to work right by it, but seldom explored it when I worked there since I had so much going on.